Talk:The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

External link

Regarding this external link:

• List of characters in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

I've reverted User:Stephen twice now who has removed it. I don't like reverting twice, in particular with a long time admin like User:Stephen. I left a note on Stephen's page asking why he has removed it, but didn't hear back, so fter a few days I reverted the second time. If we continue to disagree about it, I'd ask if Stephen would be willing to begin the conflict resolution process so we can bring in additional people to look and comment about it. Thank you and look forward to working with you. Green Cardamom (talk) 16:54, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Cover page

I tried to get an image of its front cover page under the 'Non-free book cover' copyright tag basically copying what had been done for other David Mitchell books such as 'Cloud Atlas' on WikiCommons but I just couldn't get it to work. My final shot ('don't know the license but here are all the tags anyway' was immediately marked for speedy deletion: it made me feel as if I did something criminal).

So I've deleted the image. I've spent more than an hour of my time trying to do it and I give up, very frustrated and very fed up indeed. If this is how I am going to be spending my time on Wikipedia include me out. No wonder people can't be bothered with it any more. Forget it. Andymc123 (talk) 23:17, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to the user who put it back in and smoothed things over at Wikicommons. Really aprreciated. I'll be adding more on this fine novel of David Mtchell's bye and bye. Bit busy right now. Thanks so much. Andymc123 (talk) 00:37, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

No problem. Basically all you do is upload the book cover image to en.wikipedia.org and use the {{book cover fur}} template in the Description field (copy and paste).. and choose license type "Book cover", that's it, so there's a Fair Use license, and a Fair Use Rationale ("fur"). There are other ways but that's probably the easiest for book covers. The image should be small, I think the original image you had was too large for Fair Use purposes so I scaled it down 50% just to be sure. But thanks for making it available and great to see additions to this article. Green Cardamom (talk) 03:06, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks GC. I've copied and stored for future reference. Just couldn't make it work in WikiCommons. Andymc123 (talk) 21:27, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Title

It had been claimed that "The Land of A Thousand Autumns" is a poetical term for Japan. However, this is not true. There was a link to a newspaper review to support the claim, but there was no such assertion in the review as well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Befubashi (talk • contribs) 04:08, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Befubashi. Thanks for this. You're quite correct in what you say about 日千秋 (literally "counting a thousand autumns"), but nevertheless there's a passage in the novel (recording a conversation in a ship's swillheads i.e the ship's primitive toilets) in which "land of a thousand autumns" is explicitly referenced as a metaphor for Japan

'The Japanese, I read,' says Talbot, 'give florid names to their kingdom . . .'

The unseen sailor issues an almighty orgasmic bellow of relief . . .

'. . . "The Land of a Thousand Autumns" or "The Root of the Sun".'

I'm not sure what Mitchell's intention was here, perhaps he was simply mistaken in his research. I've rewritten with a citation, but I've kept your contribution. 103.17.196.200 (talk) 01:15, 1 November 2013 (UTC) (AndyMc123)

BTW, who was the wanker (not AGK by any chance? Wikipedia's very own train station platform aficionado god he's so fucking tragic) who nominated this article for deletion? This is a novel by an established writer noted for Cloud Atlas. 103.17.196.188 (talk) 02:12, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

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A number of editors have left unsourced explanations which have been removed, claiming that:

1. There is a Japanese saying 一日千秋, literally "a thousand autumns in one day", meaning "great change in a short time."
2. Also said to mean "waiting impatiently for something"

The first one anyway isn't complete BS, see [1]. But neither of these are connected to the novel by any source. -- GreenC 04:51, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

-- GreenC 04:51, 14 October 2014 (UTC)